Keep Your Chatbot Out of the Silo
By Avi Benezra Silos are one of IT’s anathemas and while many businesses have launched their first generations of chatbots in a standalone fashion, to ensure future utility and extracting valuable data from them, future bots need to be accessible to other digital services, and able to import data from elsewhere. The joy of the cloud tech world is that most data is available across a modern business. Yet for all the joined-up companies out there, there are still plenty who have a key spreadsheet in accounting, various incompatible databases for sales, stock and parts, while marketing carefully guards its analytics results and other files that “cannot” be shared, all locked in the dreaded silo. Most company’s keep their silos out of the headlines until the time comes to create a digital business, a unified view of the company or whatever the project is called. But, one general consumer example
Chatbots – The Talk of Digital Transformation
Companies are adopting in ever increasing numbers digital transformation strategies that create new business models, improve process efficiencies and gain competitive advantage. However, many organizations are still in the early stages of digital transformation. The reasons include lack of resources, budget constraints and cultural issues; but perhaps the biggest obstacle is the overwhelming complexity of matching ever-accelerating technological innovations to business processes, not to mention fully understanding the implications of the data the technology generates. Which is why in many cases an organization’s first steps on the digital transformation journey is to implement chatbots. Why? Because they are the easiest and quickest to implement. In addition, chatbots provide explicit measurable results because they are based on existing processes. While the first implementations of chatbots is typically in customer-facing billing and service inquiries, companies are beginning to use chatbots internally to drive enterprise-wide digital transformation. Here’s why: Easy and affordable implementation
Should Your Chatbot Be Male, Female or Gender-Neutral?
A straw poll in the office shows the majority of business chatbots and virtual assistants are given a female gender and character. Is this right, does it benefit the customer and should it be the case in the future when every business has a bot? Tech and science writer Gemma Milne recent series of tweets questioned the demeaning and unnecessary portrayal of chatbots as women, the male-dominated ecosystem that builds them and several other concerns, with some valuable responses and more positive examples from the tech community. “Please, people who build chat bots, stop giving them female names and referring to them as ‘she’. Call them it. Use a made-up name. It’s so frustrating watching men present these startups on stage to a room full of men, talking about their pet female AI assistant they’ve invented.” She isn’t the first, there have been plenty of blogs on the subject, from
The Future of Chatbots in the Move to Online Conversation
By Avi Benezra Chatbots have already changed plenty over their short history, becoming smarter, broader and more capable of interacting with other services. The future of chatbots will see even greater diversity as they are folded into virtual assistants, while the big issues like ethical AI will make headlines and drive changes in how chatbots operate. The chatbot journey is one we are all going on, as business leaders, customers, health service users or travelers. Therefore, it is vital that we all understand where these bots are going, and the way they will join up with other technologies and services to improve and provide greater benefits for all of us. Technology innovation is a constant. Nothing stands still, with developers and vendors always pushing for the next version, that unique piece of differentiation or bolting on new features. As children of the cloud era, chatbots are already a well-advanced technology,
The Prize of Chatbot Marketing
Guest post by Avi Benezra, CTO of SnatchBot. Now that chatbots are the new normal, companies and marketers need to attract people to get them using the bots and more interested in sharing information. Competitions and prizes are just one way to get users interesting in chatbots, and can make a welcome return in an era that’s too focused on taking customer data for free. Rock band Feeder has been touring the world recently, and shared an interesting post to get more people using the Facebook Messenger chatbot, Tallulah. She is helping to promote their new album and tour. Everyone who had a chat with her was entered into a contest to win an expensive guitar, while secondary prizes of guest list tickets and other goodies have helped to keep the conversation rolling beyond that initial engagement. Your business might not be a globe-trotting band, and your brand might not
Chatbots Could Help Learners and Teachers in Language Education
More and more we find ourselves imagining the ways in which chatbots can assist us in our day-to-day lives. They have synergy with small tasks in our consumer habits and there is general agreement on their use value in ecommerce, healthcare and financial services. We understand that chatbots have commercial benefits, but when it comes to personal enrichment and individual gains, there is still much to be explored. AI powered language teachers are on the agenda for big players such as Duolingo, who since 2018 have stated that just because bots have been removed from the iOS app, “bots are not gone forever” and that “conversations are coming back in a more integrated way.” In 2016, Duolingo bots existed in three languages: French, Spanish, and German, and catered to native English speakers. They were removed two years later, perhaps to redesign for a less error prone application. Nevertheless, advances in
Avoiding Chatbot Crime: The Burden of Proof on Your Chatbot and Its Users
Cyber crime, deep fakes, AI heists and political hacks all help to reduce our trust in technology. Chatbots will be on the frontline in the next generation of customer/consumer crime, and your bot needs to be ready with a range of bona fides to create and build trust. If you are at work in your accounts/finance office and you pick up the phone (assuming you still do, with all the robo/scam calls going on). Imagine the boss on a crackly line demanding you transfer a large sum to seal a big deal in a do-it-now-or-we-re-all-fired manner. That is starting to happen for real, except it isn’t your boss, it’s an AI voice emulator that sounds like your boss, perhaps based on a speech he gave online or a few YouTube clips. This is real crime today, and if someone can be fooled and pressured into sending money like that, then
AI Chatbots: Igniting a Revolution in the Airline Industry
The modern airline industry handles millions of passengers every day and is in a constant ordeal to make itself better. With the increase in the number of passengers, airline companies and airports have rapidly adopted innovative technologies to handle passenger requests, deliver information and get the most out of their existing resources. Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatbots have helped companies in communicating efficiently with passengers and deliver phenomenal experience. According to a report by SITA, 68% of airlines and 42% of airports are using AI-driven chatbots. In fact, Artificial Intelligence is one of the top 5 emerging technologies for airline companies with 52% of them looking to invest in AI in the coming period. Why have Chatbots suddenly become popular in the airline industry? Chatbots are designed to enhance the customer experience and airlines are desperate on scoring better on this front. Chatbots can be developed by airlines to provide prompt
Gatwick’s Chatbot Just the Latest in Aviation Bots
Gatwick Airport joins the growing number of aviation businesses making use of chatbots to help guide their huge numbers of customers around those sprawling hallways and to the right gate on time, with a refreshing display of commitment and business smarts. Last year, London’s second busiest runway at Gatwick Airport was thrown into chaos by unsubstantiated drone sightings, cancelling flights, with armed police swarming the perimeter and chaos in the terminals. After much hunting, there probably was no drone, but it highlights the problem and potential for drone misuse around any airport. A year later and Gatwick Airport has a drone of its own, a new chatbot called Gail on Facebook Messenger to interact with passengers and visitors. Gail can provide the usual flight information, a range of flight specific notifications like delays and gate changes, plus information about the airport shops, restaurants and other facilities. Ask her for a
How ‘Chatbot’ Narratives Have Evolved in News Media: 1997-2019
It might seem as if words like ‘chatbot’, ‘AI’ and ‘machine learning’ have exploded in news media over the last ten years. That’s because they have and it’s really only in the last five years that the word ‘chatbot’ has become much more widespread and more commonly used by newspapers. Interestingly, it’s only in the last three years that ‘chatbot’ has become a casually inserted term within ordinary articles which are not explicitly about tech or AI: despite the fact that newspapers have been reporting on chatbots since the 1990s. The word ‘chatbot’ has become normalised in news media from its ‘chatterbot’ origins, and while the frequency of articles which casually make reference to chatbots has increased so have articles which mention chatbots alongside wider conversations about artificial intelligence. Ireland provides a useful case-study of the media and chatbots. The Irish Newspaper Archive is one of the most extensive online
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